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Fifteen-year-old Zhan Haite thrust herself into the spotlight last year by calling for equal education opportunities for herself and fellow children of migrant workers.
Although Zhan’s family has lived in Shanghai since 2002, she will have to take the senior high school entrance examination in Jiangxi Province, her parents’ hometown and where her hukou, or registered permanent residence, is. Instead of going to a vocational school in Shanghai or returning to Jiangxi, Zhan dropped out of school in May 2012 in protest and microblogged appeals for equal rights. Her activism has stirred a public outcry from residents with a Shanghai hukou and sparked a heated debate throughout China.
Cui Wei, a harsh critic of Zhan and organizer of Guarding Shanghai Alliance, a group of netizens who meet offline, said that removing the hukou barrier to education would cause Shanghai to be flooded with a surge of migrants from other parts of China, which would worsen the city’s living environment.
Official figures show that China has more than 260 million farmers-turned-workers living in cities. An estimated 20 million children have migrated with their parents to the cities, while more than 10 million are left behind in their rural hometowns.
China’s hukou system used to restrict children to attending schools in their home provinces. A 2003 regulation amended this by admitting migrant workers’ children into the nine-year compulsory education systems of the cities where their parents work.
Despite progress, out-of-province children are still not allowed to attend the secondary and tertiary education entrance exams locally in most cities. These children have to return to their hometowns to take entrance exams for further schooling where they are put at an enormous disadvantage due to the differences in curriculum design and exam contents. Protests from migrant workers have mounted in recent years.
Under the current policy, colleges and universities set a fixed admission quota for each provincial-level region every year. As advanced educational resources are distributed unevenly across China in terms of the number and quality of universities, a growing number of students and their parents are complaining about discrimination during the admission process based on locations of candidates’ registered permanent residence.
For example, compared to Beijing, central China’s Henan Province has fewer universities per capita. That means that a university applicant from Henan could gain admission to a much better university if he or she took the entrance examination held in Beijing, which is prohibited by the current system. In August 2012, the State Council asked provincial-level governments to formulate plans before the end of the year to eventually allow children of migrant workers to enter senior high schools and take the college entrance exam, commonly known as gaokao, locally.
By January 9, 29 of the 31 Chinese mainland provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, except Qinghai Province and Tibet Autonomous Region, had individually formulated plans which will eventually ensure that children who have followed their parents to live in a different place can enjoy the same rights to education as their local peers.
However, the plans of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, whose proportions of migrant population are among the highest in the country, have drawn more criticism than applause for being too timid.
According to the 2010 national census, Beijing had more than 7 million migrants, accounting for nearly 36 percent of the city’s permanent population. In Shanghai, 39 percent of its permanent residents were migrants, totaling 8.98 million. Guangdong’s 31.28 million migrants made up 37.48 percent of its permanent population.
Timid steps
On December 30, 2012, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong Province published respective plans regarding the further education and gaokao of migrant workers’ children.
Beijing will allow such children to attend local vocational schools in 2013 and allow them to be matriculated by universities after graduating from vocational programs in 2014, said a statement from the city’s Commission of Education.
Shanghai went a step further, saying it will allow migrant workers’ children to enter local senior high schools, vocational schools and sit the local gaokao starting in 2014.
Zhang Qianfan, a law professor at Peking University, has thrice proposed to the State Council and the Ministry of Education to allow migrant workers’ children to sit the gaokao locally without conditions. But Beijing and Shanghai’s reform efforts have disappointed him greatly.
“The so-called breakthrough of Shanghai’s plan is as trivial as I expected while Beijing’s plan is totally irrelevant,”Zhang told Time Weekly newspaper. He said that Beijing’s plan crushed the hopes of students from migrant workers’ families who anxiously waited to take their secondary or tertiary entrance exam locally this summer. “Beijing only opens up vocational education to non-permanent residents while the Central Government demanded a reform of the gaokao system,” Zhang said.
Under Shanghai’s arrangements, parents whose children are qualified for a seat at the local gaokao exam must have stable jobs, fixed residences, a local social insurance account and a high score in the local residence permit system, which favors those with high academic degrees, local property purchases, study-abroad experience and large business investment. Migrant workers from the countryside complained that these requirements have restricted qualified parents mainly to high-caliber professionals working in Shanghai.
“I am not a qualified professional due to my educational background and job, but I bet that my daughter is no less excellent than children of those with high scores in the residence permit system,” said Lin Yuanxiang, a laundry store owner from Anhui Province who has resided in Shanghai for 15 years. Lin told Time Weekly that he only received a primary school education and has no social insurance account in Shanghai. Last year Lin had to send her daughter, a second-grade student of a junior middle school, back to his hometown for the sake of educational opportunities, and can only see her once every couple of months.
According to Guangdong’s policies, children of non-permanent residents will be able to sit the local gaokao from 2016 on the condition that they have studied three years in a high school in the city where their parents work, and that their parents have had stable jobs, fixed residences and a local social insurance account for more than three years.
Restrictions would be relaxed “step by step” as the province must solve the conflict between its gigantic migrant population and a scarcity of educational resources, Luo Weiqi, head of the province’s Department of Education, told Xinhua News Agency.
Unlike Beijing and Shanghai whose college admission rates are among the highest in China, Guangdong, a densely populated province that has the largest migrant population in the country, has lower than average admission rates.
Unwelcoming locals
Advancing urbanization by ensuring equal access to public services for newcomers is high on the country’s development agenda. The report to the 18th National Congress of the ruling Communist Party of China pledged to ensure that children of rural migrant workers in cities have equal access to education. However, some local hukou holders in large cities oppose such reforms for fear that the flood of students relocated for the purpose of advancing their chances of entering a prestigious university would strain already crowded public schools.
It is estimated that primary school applicants in Beijing would soar from 100,000 in 2012 to 180,000 in 2014, bringing the total number of the city’s primary school students from the current 680,000 to 840,000.
Xiong Bingqi, Vice President of the Beijing-based 21st Century Education Research Institute, said that local governments should not be entrusted with the task of reforming the current gaokao system.
“Under the current design, opening up local gaokao seats to migrant workers’children would hurt the interests of exam takers with local hukou. It is only natural that local governments would set the bar high to protect local hukou holders’ interests when they are given the power by the Central Government,” Xiong said. The long-term observer of China’s gaokao reforms believed that the key to solving the problem lies in a more thorough reform.
“The gaokao should be transformed in accordance with the National Plan for Medium- and Long-Term Education Reform and Development that came out in 2010 to give universities the autonomy to choose students and students the freedom of choice. If all prestigious universities can select students on merit, we would not even need special policies for migrant workers’ children,” Xiong told China Radio International.
Although Zhan’s family has lived in Shanghai since 2002, she will have to take the senior high school entrance examination in Jiangxi Province, her parents’ hometown and where her hukou, or registered permanent residence, is. Instead of going to a vocational school in Shanghai or returning to Jiangxi, Zhan dropped out of school in May 2012 in protest and microblogged appeals for equal rights. Her activism has stirred a public outcry from residents with a Shanghai hukou and sparked a heated debate throughout China.
Cui Wei, a harsh critic of Zhan and organizer of Guarding Shanghai Alliance, a group of netizens who meet offline, said that removing the hukou barrier to education would cause Shanghai to be flooded with a surge of migrants from other parts of China, which would worsen the city’s living environment.
Official figures show that China has more than 260 million farmers-turned-workers living in cities. An estimated 20 million children have migrated with their parents to the cities, while more than 10 million are left behind in their rural hometowns.
China’s hukou system used to restrict children to attending schools in their home provinces. A 2003 regulation amended this by admitting migrant workers’ children into the nine-year compulsory education systems of the cities where their parents work.
Despite progress, out-of-province children are still not allowed to attend the secondary and tertiary education entrance exams locally in most cities. These children have to return to their hometowns to take entrance exams for further schooling where they are put at an enormous disadvantage due to the differences in curriculum design and exam contents. Protests from migrant workers have mounted in recent years.
Under the current policy, colleges and universities set a fixed admission quota for each provincial-level region every year. As advanced educational resources are distributed unevenly across China in terms of the number and quality of universities, a growing number of students and their parents are complaining about discrimination during the admission process based on locations of candidates’ registered permanent residence.
For example, compared to Beijing, central China’s Henan Province has fewer universities per capita. That means that a university applicant from Henan could gain admission to a much better university if he or she took the entrance examination held in Beijing, which is prohibited by the current system. In August 2012, the State Council asked provincial-level governments to formulate plans before the end of the year to eventually allow children of migrant workers to enter senior high schools and take the college entrance exam, commonly known as gaokao, locally.
By January 9, 29 of the 31 Chinese mainland provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, except Qinghai Province and Tibet Autonomous Region, had individually formulated plans which will eventually ensure that children who have followed their parents to live in a different place can enjoy the same rights to education as their local peers.
However, the plans of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, whose proportions of migrant population are among the highest in the country, have drawn more criticism than applause for being too timid.
According to the 2010 national census, Beijing had more than 7 million migrants, accounting for nearly 36 percent of the city’s permanent population. In Shanghai, 39 percent of its permanent residents were migrants, totaling 8.98 million. Guangdong’s 31.28 million migrants made up 37.48 percent of its permanent population.
Timid steps
On December 30, 2012, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong Province published respective plans regarding the further education and gaokao of migrant workers’ children.
Beijing will allow such children to attend local vocational schools in 2013 and allow them to be matriculated by universities after graduating from vocational programs in 2014, said a statement from the city’s Commission of Education.
Shanghai went a step further, saying it will allow migrant workers’ children to enter local senior high schools, vocational schools and sit the local gaokao starting in 2014.
Zhang Qianfan, a law professor at Peking University, has thrice proposed to the State Council and the Ministry of Education to allow migrant workers’ children to sit the gaokao locally without conditions. But Beijing and Shanghai’s reform efforts have disappointed him greatly.
“The so-called breakthrough of Shanghai’s plan is as trivial as I expected while Beijing’s plan is totally irrelevant,”Zhang told Time Weekly newspaper. He said that Beijing’s plan crushed the hopes of students from migrant workers’ families who anxiously waited to take their secondary or tertiary entrance exam locally this summer. “Beijing only opens up vocational education to non-permanent residents while the Central Government demanded a reform of the gaokao system,” Zhang said.
Under Shanghai’s arrangements, parents whose children are qualified for a seat at the local gaokao exam must have stable jobs, fixed residences, a local social insurance account and a high score in the local residence permit system, which favors those with high academic degrees, local property purchases, study-abroad experience and large business investment. Migrant workers from the countryside complained that these requirements have restricted qualified parents mainly to high-caliber professionals working in Shanghai.
“I am not a qualified professional due to my educational background and job, but I bet that my daughter is no less excellent than children of those with high scores in the residence permit system,” said Lin Yuanxiang, a laundry store owner from Anhui Province who has resided in Shanghai for 15 years. Lin told Time Weekly that he only received a primary school education and has no social insurance account in Shanghai. Last year Lin had to send her daughter, a second-grade student of a junior middle school, back to his hometown for the sake of educational opportunities, and can only see her once every couple of months.
According to Guangdong’s policies, children of non-permanent residents will be able to sit the local gaokao from 2016 on the condition that they have studied three years in a high school in the city where their parents work, and that their parents have had stable jobs, fixed residences and a local social insurance account for more than three years.
Restrictions would be relaxed “step by step” as the province must solve the conflict between its gigantic migrant population and a scarcity of educational resources, Luo Weiqi, head of the province’s Department of Education, told Xinhua News Agency.
Unlike Beijing and Shanghai whose college admission rates are among the highest in China, Guangdong, a densely populated province that has the largest migrant population in the country, has lower than average admission rates.
Unwelcoming locals
Advancing urbanization by ensuring equal access to public services for newcomers is high on the country’s development agenda. The report to the 18th National Congress of the ruling Communist Party of China pledged to ensure that children of rural migrant workers in cities have equal access to education. However, some local hukou holders in large cities oppose such reforms for fear that the flood of students relocated for the purpose of advancing their chances of entering a prestigious university would strain already crowded public schools.
It is estimated that primary school applicants in Beijing would soar from 100,000 in 2012 to 180,000 in 2014, bringing the total number of the city’s primary school students from the current 680,000 to 840,000.
Xiong Bingqi, Vice President of the Beijing-based 21st Century Education Research Institute, said that local governments should not be entrusted with the task of reforming the current gaokao system.
“Under the current design, opening up local gaokao seats to migrant workers’children would hurt the interests of exam takers with local hukou. It is only natural that local governments would set the bar high to protect local hukou holders’ interests when they are given the power by the Central Government,” Xiong said. The long-term observer of China’s gaokao reforms believed that the key to solving the problem lies in a more thorough reform.
“The gaokao should be transformed in accordance with the National Plan for Medium- and Long-Term Education Reform and Development that came out in 2010 to give universities the autonomy to choose students and students the freedom of choice. If all prestigious universities can select students on merit, we would not even need special policies for migrant workers’ children,” Xiong told China Radio International.